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“Lost in the Shuffle”: How Relationships and Personalized Advisement Shape Transfer Aspirations and Outcomes for Community College Students

By Maggie P. Fay, Shanna Smith Jaggars & Negar Farakish

Few community college students who aspire to transfer ever do so. Prior research suggests that relationships with advisors, faculty, and administrators may play an important role in promoting successful transfer outcomes, particularly for traditionally underserved students. This journal article examines how students at six colleges identified and weighed possible transfer destination colleges, and how dedicated and personalized advisement shaped students’ transfer plans and contributed to their transfer outcomes. The article is based on a mixed-methods study that used interviews to explore students’ transfer planning processes as well as student record data to examine transfer outcomes. Analyses compare students who received personalized transfer advising through a community college honors program and similarly qualified transfer-aspiring peers attending the same six community colleges who received “business as usual” advising. Findings suggest that personalized advisement and relationships with transfer advisors contributed to higher rates of transfer and may support transfer to more-selective destinations. This research extends the literature on community college transfer by tracing students’ planning processes, exploring factors that raise or lower transfer aspirations, and estimating the effects of an advising-intensive honors program on students’ transfer outcomes, including the selectivity of their transfer destinations. The authors also offer more empirical support for the importance of personal relationships and transfer agents in facilitating successful transfer outcomes.

View journal article (subscription may be required)
July 2022
View related blog post
July 2022

Related Publications

May 2022

Research Evidence on Community College Ask-Connect-Inspire-Plan Onboarding Practices

May 2019

American Honors: The Life and Death of a Public-Private Partnership

Additional Resources

For more policy briefs and fact sheets, visit CCRC’s Policy Resources page.

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